Elizabeth “Lizzy” Craze recently celebrated an incredible milestone—40 years since her heart transplant at Stanford.
In 1984, only a handful of transplant centers were performing heart transplants on small children—and one of them was Stanford. “When Lizzy was transplanted, we really didn’t know how long a child with a heart transplant could survive,” says David Rosenthal, MD, pediatric cardiologist and the director of the Pediatric Advanced Cardiac Therapies (PACT) program at Stanford. Lizzy was the youngest heart transplant recipient at Stanford at the time and was expected to survive only five to 10 years.
But four decades later, Lizzy is still thriving on the same donor heart, and even running marathons. She’s also—with the help of in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, and genetic testing at Stanford—a mother of a child without the heart condition that affected Lizzy and her siblings.
This article originally appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of the Packard Children’s News.
